Juno News - June 08, 2020


When will universities stop caving to the far-left？


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

158.44978

Word count

601

Sentence count

28

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A gender-critical feminist professor has been removed from a service role within the university because her views apparently upset students. Yet again, we are encountering a Canadian university punishing an academic with the wrong views using the guise of anonymous complaints by students who feel unsafe.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 Yet again, we are encountering a story of a Canadian university punishing an academic with
00:00:11.320 the wrong views using the guise of anonymous complaints by students who feel unsafe. This
00:00:18.700 time, a gender-critical feminist professor has been removed from a service role within the 1.00
00:00:24.100 university because her views apparently upset students. Kathleen Lowry is Associate Professor
00:00:30.820 of Anthropology at the University of Alberta, and she also served as the Department of Anthropology's
00:00:37.180 Associate Chair of Undergraduate Programs. So this is an administrative service role. Keep in mind,
00:00:43.020 Lowry is still a professor at the University of Alberta. Presumably, she has tenure because of her
00:00:48.520 title, Associate Professor. So the professorship is not what we're talking about here. We're talking
00:00:53.000 about this additional service role within the university that Kathleen Lowry held and is being
00:00:59.140 asked to step down from. So why was she asked to step down? Well, it's become all too familiar of a
00:01:04.640 story, but apparently there were some anonymous, informal complaints by students who felt unsafe
00:01:10.800 because Lowry is very open about being a gender-critical feminist. And for those who don't
00:01:15.960 know, a gender-critical feminist is typically someone who believes that biological sex is real, 1.00
00:01:21.420 and it is the basis for the patriarchal oppression of women. And gender-critical feminists are usually 1.00
00:01:27.800 quite critical of trans activism because they push back against this progressive mantra that
00:01:33.820 trans women are women. So they push back against trans ideology. But Lowry refused to resign from her 0.97
00:01:40.680 role as chair and said that if the university wishes to dismiss her from that role, they're going to have
00:01:46.240 to send her a letter listing the reasons why. And so she did receive a letter that was that fired her 0.67
00:01:52.540 from the position, but she was never offered any concrete reasons why. The letter from the Dean of
00:01:58.320 Arts only said that it is not in the best interests of the students or the university for Lowry to
00:02:04.120 continue as chair. I don't think I even need to go over what is wrong with the situation. It's also clear
00:02:10.400 that everything is being mishandled here. We have a professor who is not allowed to know the content
00:02:16.700 of complaints made against her. We have students who are using claims of feeling unsafe in order to
00:02:23.600 punish a professor with non-mainstream views. This in turn enforces a culture of ideological conformity
00:02:30.380 within the university. And we have a university bureaucracy that is accepting the idea that students
00:02:36.300 are allowed to say they feel unsafe just because they've encountered an opinion that they disagree
00:02:40.380 with. We need the bureaucracy to push back against that kind of thing because if you encounter an
00:02:45.580 opinion or a belief or an idea you don't like, that doesn't mean you're allowed to say that you feel
00:02:50.060 unsafe as a way to shut it down. And who knows if any student actually felt unsafe. Maybe someone just
00:02:56.620 was complaining on behalf of a hypothetical offended person who may or may not exist. When I look at this
00:03:02.380 situation, I think to myself, when will the universities stop caving to perpetually offended,
00:03:09.980 upset students? When can we finally bring back an academic culture that is proud of having heterodoxy
00:03:17.980 in its community and proud of having diverse beliefs and opinions and ideas amongst its faculty and
00:03:24.300 students? Because as I said earlier, this kind of story is becoming all too familiar. And frankly,
00:03:29.980 it is just so frustrating and tiresome. I'm Lindsay Shepard with True North.
00:03:34.860 Thank you so much for watching and I will see you in next week's video.